DANE SCHILLER, HOUSTON CHRONICLE |
June 23, 2011

Barry Bujol arrives for arraignment Tuesday at Houston's federal courthouse. Some of his court proceedings have been sealed.

He fired his first lawyer and called him a coward for jockeying for a plea deal.

He drew the wrath of a federal judge by relentlessly trying to defend himself and in the process disclosing secret and sensitive government information.

Barry Bujol Jr., the Texan accused of plotting to help al-Qaida, has been a thorn in the side of U.S. efforts to prosecute him, but it so far has done little to help him.

The towering former student at Prairie View A&M University has been in a high-security downtown Houston lockup since after he was arrested on the terror charge last June.

Meanwhile, his roller-coaster case has gone nowhere, at least in public. Some proceedings were sealed.

The American-born Muslim and former Baptist aggravated matters when he angered the judge by asking that charges be dropped due to an allegedly improper and overzealous prosecution.

Mailed from his jail cell, his request to the judge disclosed information apparently deemed sensitive to the government's terror investigation. It was immediately ordered sealed.

In fact, U.S. District Judge David Hittner was so irritated by Bujol's relentless intervention that he issued a court order barring him from filing any motions, saying that if he continued to do so, they would be returned unopened.

A trial date has been tentatively set for October. Bujol faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of providing aid to a foreign terrorist group.

His current court-appointed attorney, Edward Mallett, declined comment, but had to pass a months-long federal background investigation to view evidence in the case.

This is at least the second such case involving alleged al-Qaida connections in the Houston vicinity since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The last person charged was accused of holding himself out as willing to build bombs for al-Qaida or any group targeting the United States.He pleaded guilty to attempting to provide aid to a foreign terrorist group in 2007, and was released from prison last year.

In the past two years, 74 people were publicly charged nationwide with committing the same crime Bujol is accused of, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Many who have been charged with similar crimes in the past have pleaded guilty in return for leniency.

And so stands the case of an alleged home-grown terrorist arrested at the Port of Houston as he slipped aboard a ship for a journey to the Middle East, where prosecutors contend he was to be trained.

The arrest was the end of what authorities contend was a clandestine courtship that involved Bujol using a dozen email addresses as he wrote in code of joining holy warriors. He even allegedly went to bogus drop sites in Memorial Park, thinking he was proving himself worthy of being recruited by a man who was not a terrorist operative, but an undercover government informant.

Mysterious email tip

Bujol contends that federal agents knew long before he was arrested that he was not the man they were seeking, based on an email tip that he contends started the probe.

And if it were not for the government coercing and harassing him, including enlisting a confidential informant posing as an al-Qaida member, events leading to his arrest never would have happened, he contends.

He's not alone with such concerns.

An FBI agent who retired in 2006 said he worries that the U.S. government has used rogue informants in various parts of the country to bust people in exchange for cash.

In former agent Jim Wedick's perspective: "9/11 happens, we see those buildings come down, and all of sudden we are not only paying informants hundreds of thousands of dollars but we have these guys with criminal records going around, suggesting this and that.

"I am worried that people get caught up in these schemes."

Prosecutors, as well as the Department of Justice, declined to comment on Bujol.

"Undercover operations have been used for decades by law enforcement to combat all types of criminals,,"Boyd said.

"In the terrorism arena, undercover operations are just one of many different tools that law enforcement may use to neutralize a potential terror threat," he continued.

Boyd pointed to a number of recent convictions, including one earlier this year in which a man was sentenced to life in prison for his role in a plot to carry out an attack on a New York airport.

Original target ignored

As for Bujol, it is unclear if he ever even spoke to a real member of al-Qaida.

The email that supposedly started the case briefly became public when Bujol included it in his request that charges be dropped.

"I would like to report a potential terrorist," began the note from a man who claimed to attend a local mosque. "He came and tried to recruit me to join."

Bujol contends he didn't even match the man described in the email, but that agents pressed on.

Investigators studied Bujol's emails and hid a camera outside his apartment, according to court papers.

At some point they decided to make Bujol their target instead of the man in the original tip.

"The FBI never talked to me," the man named in the first email as an alleged terrorist said when contacted by the Chronicle. "You are talking about something (from) four years ago. This is bizarre. Why didn't the government ever contact me?"